Constructor: John Guzzetta
Relative difficulty: Medium (untimed)
![]()
THEME: none
Word of the Day: NEC (62A: Major chip maker) —
![]()
Happy Boxing Day. This one was DRAB. There's not a single answer here that I was really excited to see. Maybe people think SELF-DRIVING CAR is pretty showy, but my feelings about cars in general, and these pedestrian-maiming data-collecting Matrix-serving cars in particular, are pretty negative, so no joy there. From tech bros to sports bros (LEFT TACKLE crossing AIKMAN) to poker bros (CARD SHARKS*), to political bros (ELDER STATESMAN), this puzzle bros its way through brosville. There's just one woman mentioned in the whole puzzle (also the puzzle's lone Black person) (22A: Singer India.___), and she's only there because she's crosswordese, i.e. short answer, favorable letters. You do get ANN, but the clue makes that a city name part, not a woman (42A: One "A" in the Michigan nickname). Please don't ask me to count DAMSEL, since that word evokes only distress. Compare this puzzle with yesterday's, and (I hope) you really see a difference in vision. Not only did yesterday's have more plain-old winners, but it deliberately included All Kinds of stuff, All Kinds of people. You could really feel the conscious inclusivity. This one, on the other hand, feels like not much thought was given to diversifying the fill or the cluing. Very traditional, in the sense that puzzles "traditionally" oriented themselves to an older, white audience. There's nothing terrible about this puzzle. It just has no sizzle and feels like it belongs to a bygone (more exclusionary) era. I think SPARKS was probably my favorite thing in the puzzle, mostly because I got a little jolt (!) of Aha. Nothing else in the puzzle gave me much of a jolt.
![]()
Relative difficulty: Medium (untimed)
Word of the Day: NEC (62A: Major chip maker) —
NEC Corporation (日本電気株式会社, Nippon Denki Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics company, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, AI, IoT platform, and 5G network products, to business enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies, and has also been the biggest PC vendor in Japan since the 1980s, when it launched the PC-8000 series.
NEC was the world's fourth largest PC manufacturer by 1990. Its semiconductors business unit was the world's largest semiconductor company by annual revenue from 1985 to 1992, the second largest in 1995, one of the top three in 2000, and one of the top 10 in 2006. NEC spun off its semiconductor business to Renesas Electronics and Elpida Memory. Once Japan's major electronics company, NEC has largely withdrawn from manufacturing since the beginning of the 21st century.
NEC was #463 on the 2017 Fortune 500 list. NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group. (wikipedia)
• • •
Found the west much easier than the east, mainly because the clue on SELF-DRIVING CAR is so contrived (10D: Something for which a dealer might tell customers "Hands off!"). It's trying so hard to be clever and misdirective that it ends up creating a completely implausible scenario on a literal level. Imagine any salesperson shouting "Hands off!" at customers. It's too harshly admonitory and too infantilizing to be realistic. The clue needed a "?" because it's doing a wordplay thing that distorts the literal plausibility of the clue too much. Again, if you're gonna get winky and clever with your clues, They Must Land. Bah. Anyway, the first time I felt stuck was here:
The NE was the real problem. Just after I took this screenshot, I looked at the clue for LEFT TACKLE and got it instantly (52A: Protector of a quarterback's blind side, often), so despite my having almost completely forgotten that Troy AIKMAN once existed, I managed to piece that corner together. But even with -INGCAR at the end of 10D, I couldn't understand what the clue wanted. So the NE looked bad for a little bit. It's possible I would've gotten DO-OVERS (not DOES OVER) eventually (36A: Retries; a noun!), and even possible that PICOT would've leapt into my brain (32A: Embroidery loop), but what weirdly saved me up there, what did actually leap into my head after I thought about it for two or three seconds, was POLAR ICE (11D: Cap material). Brain just rolodexed through cap types, hit ice cap, and bam, with just the "O" in place: POLAR ICE. And then all of a sudden, seemingly in a flash, a daunting, wide-open empty space was filled and the puzzle was done. Wish I'd liked it more.
Any tricky stuff that needs explaining? FAUX AMIS means "false friends," in case that was unclear (57A: Words in a foreign language that bear a deceptive resemblance to those in another, like the French "décevoir" ("disappoint") and the English "deceive"). I know the term "false cognates," but if I ever knew FAUX AMIS, I forgot it. Alas and alack. There are two "N"s in "pennies," so that's what that clue is about (56D: Couple of pennies? = ENS). I don't like it either, but it's an unfortunately common little gimmick for cluing double letters (ENS EMS PEES etc.). I think that's it. Enjoy your day. Good luck with all your boxing!
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
*I'm well aware that women *can* be CARD SHARKS, but every single one I've ever seen on screen or anywhere has been a dude, and the card-playing word is an absolute sausagefest so please don't "well, actually" me on this one, thx. Well, actually, you can "well, actually" me on this one, but only if it's to say, "well, actually, the term is CARD SHARPS"
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]